“Certain commentators, like Spalding, Wright, and Madden, have been pleased to impugn the integrity of Heminge and Condell, but, in so doing, they have gone much further than there was ever any warrant for them to go. Heminge and Condell did not ‘fail in their duty;’ the First Folio is not ‘dishonest;’ and to say, or to insinuate, that it has been discredited is to use the language of gross injustice and sheer extravagance.
“The primary defect in the First Folio—the defect to which all modern editors of Shakespeare have called attention, and the point upon which so much stress is now laid—is the discrepancy between a few words of the preface and the contents of the book. In their ‘Address’ or preface, Heminge and Condell say, ‘We have scarce received from him (Shakespeare) a blot in his papers.’ It has been found, however, that several of the plays were, in fact, reprinted from earlier quartos, and that, in some cases, earlier quartos that were not consulted contain a better text than the Folio. This is the sum of all the fault that can be imputed to Heminge and Condell, except, indeed, that the proofs of the Folio were not carefully read and scrupulously corrected; but Heminge and Condell were not men of letters.
“The late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps was an implicit believer in William Shakespeare as the author of the plays; he never wavered in that belief; he is acknowledged as ‘the most competent Shakespeare worker who ever lived.’ The language of Halliwell-Phillipps accordingly, with reference to the First Folio and to Heminge and Condell, ought to carry some weight. These are his words,—
“‘These estimable men who are kindly remembered in the poet’s will are not likely to have encouraged the speculation from motives of gain.... When we find Heminge and Condell not only initiating and vigorously supporting the design, but expressing their regret that Shakespeare himself had not lived to direct the publication, who can doubt that they were acting as trustees for his memory, or that the noble volume was a record of their affection? Who can ungraciously question their sincerity?... What plausible reason can be given for not accepting the literal truth of their description of themselves as ‘a pair so careful to show their gratitude to the dead?’... Heminge and Condell speak of themselves as mere gatherers, and it is nearly certain that all that they did was to ransack their dramatic stores for the best copies of the plays that they could find, handing those copies over to the printers, in the full persuasion that, in taking this course, they were morally relieved of all further responsibility.... Out of the thirty-six dramas that they collected one-half had never been published in any shape.... There is nothing to show that fair copies were ever made in those days for the prompters.... So far from being astonished at the textual imperfections of the Folio, we ought to be profoundly thankful for what is, under the circumstances, its marvellous state of comparative excellence. Heminge and Condell did the best they could, to the best of their judgment. It never could have entered their imagination that the day would arrive for the comfort of intellectual life to be marred by the distorted texts of ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear.’ There cannot, indeed, be a doubt that, according to their lights, they expressed a sincere conviction when they delivered the immortal dramas to the public as being ‘absolute in their numbers, as he (Shakespeare) conceived them.’... There is nothing in the writings of Heminge and Condell to warrant a suspicion that there was a single wilful misrepresentation of facts.... Statement ... that the entire volume was printed from the author’s own manuscripts would have been a serious misrepresentation, but the language of Heminge and Condell does not necessarily, under any line of interpretation, express so much, and in all probability they are here speaking themselves in their managerial capacity, referring to the singularly few alterations that they had observed in the manuscripts which he delivered to them for the use of the theatre.... Nor, in our measure of gratitude for the First Folio—the greatest literary treasure the world possesses—should we neglect to include a tribute to Ben Jonson.’
“The First Shakespeare Folio distinctly and unequivocally declares that its contents (all the Shakespeare plays except ‘Pericles’), were written by William Shakespeare—then, 1623, deceased—and it is prefaced with a noble tribute to him, by his great contemporary Ben Jonson, and with a portrait of him, authenticated by Jonson’s verses. The authenticity of that book was not questioned by any person living at the time of its publication, nor was its validity assailed until many generations had passed away. It remains authentic; and no amount of pettifogging as to its defects—all of which are easily comprehensible and explicable—will ever destroy its force as conclusive evidence of the authorship of Shakespeare.
“It is not forgotten (strange if it were, considering how continuously and strenuously the fact is proclaimed!) that actors and dramatic authors, in the time of ‘Eliza and our James,’ were legally liable to severe penalties for satire of ‘the great.’ What of it? Penal legislation did not make actors less industrious in their vocation, or authors less prolific, or the theatre less popular. Shakespeare, Greene, Heywood, Marlowe, Lyly, Nash, Lodge, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and all the rest, continued to write plays, and continued not to be ashamed of them or afraid of the law. Nature also has laws; and the product of the English poetic drama, between 1580 and 1640, surpasses, in wealth, variety, and splendor, every kindred product in the history of mankind.
“Direct, conclusive, final evidence that Henry Chettle referred to Shakespeare, in the apology that he made for having published Robert Greene’s attack on ‘Shakescene,’ does not exist: that is to say, the name of Shakespeare is not actually mentioned by Chettle; but, if ‘imputation and strong circumstance, which lead directly to the door of truth,’ are evidence, the rational conclusion is irresistible that the reference was to Shakespeare. Upon a careful reading of Greene’s ‘Groats-worth of Wit’ and Chettle’s ‘Kind Heart’s Dream,’ no other conclusion seems possible. Shakespeare scholars have invariably accepted it.
“Inquiry as to the authenticity of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 need not here be pursued. There might be a time to consider ‘analogy’ between the circumstances of that book and those of the First Folio of Shakespeare, if, primarily, it could be shown that Beaumont and Fletcher were actors, that they bequeathed money to two fellow-actors with which to buy memorial rings, and that those two fellow-actors, ‘careful to show their gratitude to the dead,’ collected and published their plays, as a duty of affectionate friendship and ‘to do an office for the dead.’ At present the two books stand before the world in a totally different light,—for the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 (on its face authentic) was introduced by a stationer who had never known or seen those authors and knew nothing about them or their works, save what he had gleaned at second-hand.
“No case can be made for Bacon as the author of Shakespeare by aspersing the memory of Heminge and Condell, or by assailing the authenticity of their Folio. The Baconian delusion is not a product of scholarship, but of perverse incredulity and crazy and mischievous conjecture. Delia Bacon went mad over it years ago, and since her time there has been a procession of harmless lunatics steadily moving in the same way. Every little while some new crank starts up with a theory that something well known to have happened ‘never could have happened,’ and upon that gratuitous assumption a prodigious structure of phantasy is very soon reared. Lately, for example, it has impressed several persons as remarkable that a scantily educated youth, reared in a little rural village, and adventurously migrating to the capital to seek his fortune, should have acquired, so soon and so readily, the correct style that appears in the poems of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ‘Tarquin and Lucrece,’ and the Sonnets. Instances of admirably correct versification made by novices, illiterate as well as scholastic, throughout the history of poetical literature, meantime, causes no surprise. The youthful achievements of Cowley and Pope and Chatterton are taken quite as a matter of course. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who had no education at all, nevertheless could, and did, write verse as harmonious, as correct, and as finished as that of Sir Walter Scott, who possessed every advantage that education could bestow. ‘He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.’
“That which has happened to others, however, must not—in the reasoning of these censors—happen to Shakespeare. He alone, of all men, must be thought to have developed by rule and line. The dominant fact, all the same, remains unchanged,—the decisive fact of Shakespeare’s colossal, transcendent poetic genius, the instantaneous insight and intuition whereby he grasped all knowledge of human nature, and the faculty of clear, fluent, illuminative expression, whereby he was able to utter all things in a language of imperishable beauty. Nothing indeed could be more preposterous than the wild theory on which the whole Baconian fabric of detraction reposes,—the theory that because, to prosaic perception, a certain thing seems unlikely to have happened, therefore it never did happen. Byron mentions a certain Abbé who wrote a treatise on the Swedish Constitution, proving it to be indissoluble and eternal, just as Gustavus III. had destroyed it: ‘Sir,’ said the Abbé, ‘the King of Sweden may overthrow the Constitution, but not my book.’ Shakespeare, of course, ought not to have been able to write the ‘Venus,’ or the ‘Lucrece,’ or the Sonnets, or the Plays, or anything else, and he would not have been had he possessed a properly respectful prescience of the doubts of Mr. Hallam, the mental perplexities of the portentous Owen, and the excruciating divinations of Mrs. Gallup—that oracular dame whose fiery-footed steeds are just now prancing over the mangled remains not merely of the philosopher Bacon, but of Queen Elizabeth and all her ‘spacious times.’ But, unhappily for these distressed beings, Shakespeare did write all those things, and the fact of his authorship of them remains as solid and permanent as any fact ever was, since the beginning of recorded time.